Personal Tools Are the Best Software

Last week I downloaded another habit tracker. Slick onboarding, nice animations, the works. Five minutes in, I realized it couldn’t do the one thing I wanted: let me log a habit with a single tap from a home screen widget without opening the app. There was a toggle for dark mode, a social feed for “accountability partners,” and an upsell to premium. But not the one thing.

So I closed it and started vibecoding my own.

This happens more often than I’d like to admit. I find an app, try it, hit a wall that shouldn’t exist, and end up just making the thing myself. And every single time, the version I build turns out better. Not because I’m a better designer than the people at those companies. It’s because I’m building for an audience of one, and that changes everything.

You skip everything that doesn’t matter

When you build a tool for yourself, you don’t need onboarding. You already know how it works because you wrote it. You don’t need an account system because you’re the only user. You don’t need analytics, A/B tests, or a pricing page. You don’t need to handle edge cases for people with different workflows, because yours is the only workflow.

What you’re left with is the actual thing. The core function. No wrapping, no padding, no filler. Just the part that matters.

That might sound obvious, but think about how much of the software you use daily is not the core function. It’s authentication flows, settings screens, permission modals, update prompts, and “what’s new” popups. Strip all of that away and you get something that feels impossibly fast and light.

Why these tools end up better

The feedback loop is instant. I use the thing, notice something off, and fix it in the same sitting. There’s no ticket to file, no sprint to wait for, no PM to convince. The gap between “this is annoying” and “this is fixed” is minutes, not months.

I also understand the edge cases in a way no outside developer could, because I live them. These aren’t things you’d learn from user interviews. They’re things you know because it’s your life.

And maybe the biggest thing: there’s zero pressure to generalize. A tool that works perfectly for one person is genuinely better than a tool that works okay for a million. When you don’t have to account for every possible user, every possible screen size, every possible use case, you can make something that fits like it was tailor-made. Because it was.

It adds up

No single tool is life-changing on its own. But across all of them, the friction savings compound. Your workflow becomes something that’s uniquely yours, shaped by tools you made to fit your specific life. Nobody else could use half of them, and that’s fine. That’s the point.

I have a bunch more ideas like this - tools I want to exist but don’t, problems that are too specific for any company to solve. They’ll get built eventually, one weekend at a time.

The thing is

I’m not going to tell you to go build your own tools. Maybe you already do. Maybe you have no interest in it. But I will say this: the best software I use every day isn’t something I downloaded or paid for. It’s the stuff I wrote for myself, usually on a weekend, usually because I was annoyed at something. It’s not pretty, it’s not scalable, and it’ll never have a landing page. But it works exactly the way I want, and honestly, that’s the highest bar any software can clear.